Solid history and archaeology combines with an understated call to preserve Bears Ears—all of it, not just a sliver.
An archaeologist delivers an in-depth history, stretching thousands of years, of an iconic and embattled Southwestern cultural area.
Archaeologists have long known that the Four Corners area of southeastern Utah is a cultural boundary zone, marking the westernmost extension of the ancient Mesa Verde region. “As archaeology has progressed upward,” writes Burrillo, “from consideration solely of artifacts, to consideration of sites, to consideration of communities, to consideration of culture areas…archaeologists have come to appreciate that no accurate portrayal of human sociocultural anything can be fully understood at less than a regional scale.” The Bears Ears area contains hundreds of sites and has been little explored, and though set aside for federal protection by Barack Obama, Donald Trump has decommissioned most of the vast site in favor of oil and gas development. Burrillo is an able interpreter of the place, locating it within a larger story of how archaeologists do their work, especially when it comes to cultural remains that are very old and thus usually very scarce. “Animal skins and ephemeral huts and whatever food they managed to collect or clobber with simple tools” usually don’t have a long shelf life. This has led to considerable speculation and the rise of interesting if controversial theories, including the thought that Chaco Canyon, also allied with Mesa Verde, was ruled by “a series of mighty queens,” an interpretation that Burrillo calls “pretty cool.” The author points the way toward pit houses, archaeoastronomical sites, petroglyphs, and other features without giving away too much specific information that might guide vandals and artifact hunters to the area. Wisely, he also suggests that ethnographic interpretation be left to Native peoples of the area, whose stories and legends are a form of history: “The deep history of Bears Ears is mostly Indigenous, after all, so the future of its archaeology should be mostly Indigenous as well.”
Solid history and archaeology combines with an understated call to preserve Bears Ears—all of it, not just a sliver.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-948814-30-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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